大象传媒

Combat GHG "pollution" by generating noise pollution. Hmmm, it never occurred to me. It makes sense....to somebody. :-) Do you think if they make enough noise it would reverse climate change? How about praying instead. At least silent prayer is...well...silent. Hey all you believers, if you pray hard enough to reverse global warming, maybe your prayers will be answered. Pray harder. Harder. HARDER. "HE" CAN'T HEAR YOU! Hmmm, on second thought, maybe you'd better not pray too hard, you might accidently bring on an ice age.

To coincide with the UN Climate Change Conference, which begins on Monday in Bali, marches and demonstrations will be taking place across the world, including in the UK and Ireland, which will illustrate the demand for strong action to be taken by governments on climate change.

Now the mob is on the march and for what? If climate change is not man-caused what are 鈥榞overnments鈥� going to do about it?

In

/blogs/ni/2007/11/time_to_bin_the_plastic_bag.html

I discussed with Mark what anthropogenic CO2 has got to do with global warming and indicated that it seemed close to nothing as I read the evidence!

I wonder how many of the marchers will have considered some of the scientific disputes that I quoted from a discussion at

1) Over the past half-million years a rise of CO2 concentration did not precede the changes in air temperature but followed them. The rise in global temperatures could not have been caused by CO2 but rather the reverse was the case.

2) Antarctic ice cores show that rises in levels of CO2 have lagged 800 years behind temperature rises at specific times in the geological past.

3) Correlation is not the same as causation. Just because CO2 and temperature rise are correlated does not mean that one is a cause of the other. The medical profession and the news media constantly fall into this trap. How many times have you heard that a study has been conducted of the people who suffer from breast cancer and it has been found that increase in breast cancer is related to a high consumption of something like bananas? It鈥檚 all baloney. Newark has more synagogues than Salt Lake City and the crime is higher in Newark. So is the higher crime rate caused by the presence of synagogues? The correlation is certainly there, the causation is NOT.

4) About 3% of the CO2 in the atmosphere is anthropogenic; 97% comes from natural sources.

5) The Earth receives as much energy from the sun in one hour as Man produces in one year.

6) The output of the sun's energy varies on numerous cycles one of which is the eleven year sunspot cycle.

7) Projections and Predictions are totally different and vastly misunderstood terms. When we place inputs into a computer model we get an output which can be extrapolated to make a 'projection' based on the model's inputs. Unfortunately, the media and the global warming alarmists take these computer projections and refer to them as 'predictions'. Projections are always accurate - the computer has just calculated something based on what you gave it. But to refer to the projection as an 'accurate prediction' is stupidity gone mad.

8) One argument is that increased solar radiation is warming the earth. This radiation may also cause the oceans to release some of the CO2 that has naturally been absorbed there. As water temperature rises the solubility of CO2 in it decreases. So the majority of the build up of CO2 in the atmosphere is not driven by human activity but is driven by the sun鈥檚 activity. Now as the sun drives CO2 out of the seas, this CO2 can indeed act as a blanket trapping heat in the earth鈥檚 atmosphere and magnify the warming of the earth beyond what would occur in the absence of a CO2 鈥榮ink鈥� in the seas. Also as things warm up white stuff melts and the reflectivity goes down (more heat absorbed). It is not surprising that once a warm period begins that the warming accelerates. The same thing will happen in reverse in millions of years when the process reverses and we enter the next ice-age. So a 鈥榗ause鈥� of global warming might likely be an increase in the radiation output from the sun which has the effect of causing an increase in warming and CO2.

Philosopher David Hume wrote:

A wise man considers which side is supported by the greater number of ecperiments: To that side he inclines, with doubt and hesitation; and when at last he fixes his judgment, the evidence exceeds not what we properly call 鈥榩robability鈥�. All probability, then, supposes an opposition of experiments and observations, where the one side is found to over balance the other, and to produce a degree of evidence, proportioned to the superiority. A hundred instances or experiments on one side, and fifty on another, afford a doubtful expectation of any event; though a hundred uniform experiments, with only one that is contradictory, reasonable beget a pretty strong degree of assurance. In all cases, we must balance the opposite experiments, where they are opposite, and deduct the smaller number from the greater, in order to know the exact force of the superior evidence.

In my view once 鈥榤arching鈥� begins doubt disappears out of the window.

Regards,
Michael

Unfortunately, Michael, your reference to David Hume would seem to backfire badly. Hume advises us to follow where the bulk of the evidence leads. The IPCC draws on the work of many leading scientists around the world and it concludes that human activity is a major factor in the well documented process of global warming. See

The Stern Report for the UK Government accepted its findings.

But you ask us to dismiss the work of all those scientists in favour of your own theory of sun spot cycles - which is not new and was found to be inadequate to explain the data.

I think Hume would have advised us to listen to the IPCC.

Les:

I ask no one to dismiss anything. People can look at the evidence and make up their own minds. Do you?

Further, I have no theory of my own on sun spot cycles. Where did you get that from? Have you been eating those mushy peas again?

I can find you as many experts opposed to the IPCC as you can favoring it. So what? Start here if you wish .....

You said

Unfortunately, Michael, your reference to David Hume would seem to backfire badly ....I think Hume would have advised us to listen to the IPCC.

If you wish to exchange views on the data I will be happy to do so and then we will see what if anything has backfired.

Regards,
Michael

N Ireland now boasts 1,000,000 vehicles. You only have to stand beside a major road for a few minutes to realise the amount of exhaust gases that even this small province produces - day in, day out, year in, year out. Then you have to add in the power stations, ships, planes, central heating, etc, all burning fossil fuels. It takes a special kind of myopia to deny the effect that all of that has.

The IPCC is not a bunch of civil servants tucked away in an office. It is a collaborative effort by thousands of scientists around the world. Here is an account of its work from the Guardian:

"If climate change is the biggest problem to face the planet, then the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) seems a suitably large enough organisation to tackle it. Thousands of scientists from across the world contribute to the work of the panel and the near 3,000 pages of reports it publishes every few years. The IPCC does not carry out its own research, or fund studies on its behalf. Instead it acts as a gigantic jury: assessing the available evidence and delivering its weighty verdicts. And, these being scientists, even the IPCC's definition of reasonable doubt is precisely described in percentage terms.

Created in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organisation and the United Nations Environment Programme, the IPCC was asked to "assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of the risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation". You can see why it needs 3,000 pages.

The three main strands: science, impacts and mitigation are assessed by a separate working group each made up of a core of nominated experts. Their work is supported by a wider group of other researchers, political officials, green campaigners and industry representatives, and a technical unit to shuffle the paperwork. The authors of each working report sift through thousands of published and peer-reviewed reports, scientific papers and reviews on all the relevant topics and attempt to summarise the sum of human knowledge on each, in a new report. These reports also get reviewed, by just about anyone with the required expertise who wishes, and then they get bundled together. Each working group - jointly chaired by a scientist from a developed and a developing country - also produces a summary for policymakers, which must be agreed by political officials and tends to get most of the attention, not least because they are released with great fanfare at high-profile launches.

The process takes about three years, and the IPCC has repeated it four times; their most recent working group reports were published earlier this year, with the combined effort due very soon. The panel's three previous efforts - formally called Assessment Reports - appeared in 1990, 1996 and 2001, and chronologically reflect increasing scientific agreement that global warming is real and man-made."

You can read the rest of the article at

Les Reid wrote:

You only have to stand beside a major road for a few minutes to realise the amount of exhaust gases that even this small province produces - day in, day out, year in, year out. Then you have to add in the power stations, ships, planes, central heating, etc, all burning fossil fuels. It takes a special kind of myopia to deny the effect that all of that has.

Well let me quantify it for you! Its 3% of all atmospheric CO2. The other 97% is controlled by the oceans, biomass decomposition etc. which is controlled by the SUN! A minute increase in solar radiation on the earth causes CO2 to be released from the oceans over hundreds of years. As I pointed out to you before the amount of energy impacting the earth from the sun in one hour exceeds all of that generated in a year by earth sources, natural and man-caused.

Plug in a O.1% change of solar output into climate prediction models and disaster follows.

So much for standing beside Irish roadsides!

Regards,
Michael

I don't know where you get your 3% from. It does seem such a small amount that it makes the human input into global warming seem minor.

But even if it is true that man-made greenhouse gases account for only 3% of the total, it would still be quite foolhardy to regard that as of no consequence. A 3% gradient as a linear graph does not look like much. But if there is feed-back (ie. between human factors and non-human factors) then the 3% becomes a rate of acceleration and what you have is an exponential curve which soon achieves dramatic proportions.

Your argument sounds like the slogan of a complacent polluter. "Forget about saving the planet - human activity has only trivial effect on climate."

Unfortunately, if you are wrong and human activity continues unrestrainedly, then climate destabilisation will have disastrous consequences all round. Weather systems are more delicate than we realised. A small change in the average temperature over Siberia, for example, will thaw the perma-frost and release vast quantities of greenhouse gases. That small change might be the 3% that you ignored at the start.

Re #7

I don't know where you get your 3% from. It does seem such a small amount that it makes the human input into global warming seem minor.

Google this question and you will come up with lots of confirmation of this fact.

But even if it is true that man-made greenhouse gases account for only 3% of the total, it would still be quite foolhardy to regard that as of no consequence. A 3% gradient as a linear graph does not look like much. But if there is feed-back (ie. between human factors and non-human factors) then the 3% becomes a rate of acceleration and what you have is an exponential curve which soon achieves dramatic proportions.

Well you are struggling with this argument but at least you are struggling scientifically and so this requires a helpful response from me as follows:

Water vapor constitutes the Earth's most significant greenhouse gas and accounts for 95% of Earth's greenhouse effect. CO2 is responsible for 3.5%, methane is responsible for about 0.36%, nitrous oxide 0.95%, CFCs 0.07% of the total greenhouse effect.

Water vapor is directly controlled by the sun and the earth鈥檚 cloud cover. Global warming gurus tend to completely ignore the dominant effect of water vapor in the greenhouse system. The other atmospheric greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), etc. are also mostly of natural origin (CO2 for example coming 97% from natural sources as I mentioned before). Human activities are so small in comparison to natural sources that we can do nothing about their effect on climate.

So, Les, we have man making about 3% of the total CO2 and we total atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) -- both man-made and natural-- being only about 3.5% of the total greenhouse effect.

Let me repeat 鈥�. 3.5% of the greenhouse effect comes from CO2 of which approximately 3% of the total CO2 is anthropogenic. So man鈥檚 鈥淐O2 effect鈥� on the greenhouse effect is 3% of 3.5% - you can do the math 鈥� it鈥檚 a damn small number.

See where the numbers start to lead?

Now how much time, money and effort do you wish to invest there. Wall Street has it at Zero!

Your argument sounds like the slogan of a complacent polluter. "Forget about saving the planet - human activity has only trivial effect on climate."

Normally, Les, I would smack you down for a comment like this but I鈥檓 in a good mood today so I'll turn the other cheek. However, you said in an earlier comment:

Unfortunately, Michael, your reference to David Hume would seem to backfire badly ....I think Hume would have advised us to listen to the IPCC.

To which I replied

If you wish to exchange views on the data I will be happy to do so and then we will see what if anything has backfired.

At this point would you like to retract your comment on my misuse of Hume?

Regards,
Michael

Hume still favours the IPCC. He said that an impartial seeker after truth should go where the greater number of experimental findings lead him/her.

The IPCC draws on the work of thousands of scientists, many of whom are conducting the kind of experiments that Hume requires.

All you offer is a knock-down argument based on assertions which I do not have the science to prove or disprove. You do not claim to have conducted any experiments. Any reasonable person who understands the risks involved if we get the answer wrong on this issue will accept the verdict of the IPCC, not only because they are many and you are one, but more significantly, because they are sticking their necks out and saying things that their sponsor governments do not want to hear. Their actions have the ring of integrity.

You should submit your argument to the IPCC and tell us how they respond.

Re #9

I do not have the science to prove or disprove.

Then may I help by directing you to "Shattered Consensus" ...

"The beauty of science is that truth is determined by observation and not by consensus. The seemly endless press releases, commentary and resolutions claiming a consensus for the anthropogenic climate change hypothesis is scientifically meaningless. The consensus claims, however, must be answered. This book, Shattered Consensus, presents the scientific facts underlying many of the "consensus" claims in a series of chapters answers some of those claims. The Chapter by McKitrick on the false claims of the "Hockey Stick" will be a classic -- comparable to Irving Langmuir鈥檚 1953 talk on Pathological Science." -- David Douglass, Professor of Physics, University of Rochester

And since you refused my invitation:

would you like to retract your comment on my misuse of Hume?

further discussion is not warranted.

Michael